Professor Jennifer C. Hou passed away peacefully on Sunday December 2nd, 2007 with her son, Andrew, at her side after a long and brave fight against cancer To share memories of Jennifer, please visit http://index.cs.uiuc.edu/guestbook/guestbook.html.

Jennifer C. Hou is elected to be an IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2008.

Jennifer C. Hou is elected to be a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM!

Three of our INFOCOM submissions are accepted for publication!!! The acceptance rate this year is 20%. Congratulations to Yan Gao, I-Hong Hou (in collaboration with Tarek Abdelzaher and Indy Gupta), Yong Yang, and Zheng Zeng!

Our NSF STTR proposal on building a personal assistant system to help elder people with their independent living (jointly with QualityCare Technologies, LLC) has been approved for funding! This brings us one (tiny) step closer to commercialize our research results.

Jennifer C. Hou is invited to serve on the Editorial Board of IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing

Our NSF Computer Systems REsearch/EHS proposal has been selected for funding! This allows us to build a formal model based robust architecture for medical device composition.

Our NSF Computing Research Infrastructure proposal has been selected for funding! This allows us to build a city-wide, one-of-a-kind wireless mesh network for city-wide wireless access and as part of the GENI testbed.

Both Ahmed Sobeih and Yong Yang are awarded the Vodafone Graduate Fellowship in 2007-2008! Congratuations!!!

Jennifer C. Hou is invited to speak at the the second annual Women's Institute in Summer Enrichment (WISE 2007) held at the University of California, Berkeley on June 10-15.

Three of our team members will go for summer interns this year: Luke Kung to Qualcomm, Yong Yang to Oak Ridge National Labs, and Yan Gao to Chinese University of Hong Kong.

As the IEEE INFOCOM 2007 demo chair, Jennifer C. Hou has organized a demo session of 13 demos in the areas of wireless networks, sensor networks, network measurement and p2p applications.

As the IEEE INFOCOM 2007 panel co-chairs, Jennifer C. Hou and Rodrigo Garces have planned three panels on Clean-Slate Designs for a Future Internet, Wireless Sensor Networks: Bridging the Physical and Cyber Space, and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks: Reality or Lab Demo.

Jennifer C. Hou has been invited to serve on the editorial board of IEEE Trans. on Computers.

Both Ting-Yu's and Chunyu's papers are accepted for publication in the most prestigious IEEE networking conference, IEEE INFOCOM 2007. The acceptance rate is 18% this year. Yong and Luke's paper is also accepted for publication in the INFOCOM miniconference. The acceptance rate is 25%. Our hit ratio this year is again 100%.

The special issue of Network Modeling and Simulation guest edited by Jennifer Hou and P. R. Kumar will appear in Computer Networks, Volume 50, Issue 12, in August 2006.

Preparation for the premier IEEE networking conference, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 has started. Jennifer Hou will serve as a technical co-chair jointly with Krishna Sivalingam and Shivkumar Kalyanaraman.

Jennifer Hou has been invited to serve as the Technical Co-chair of the premier ACM International Conf. on Mobile Computing and Networking, Mobicom 2007. She will be working with Ram Ramanathan of BBN on chairing this conference.

Our NSF NeTS proposal entitled "Toward building a performance predictable wireless mesh network" has been selected by the Network Technology and Systems Program for funding at the full level of $500K for 3 years. We will leverage CUWiN as a city-wide research testbed to understand how, and to what extent, wireless links are affected by PHY/MAC attributes and other environmental factors; characterize the behavior of wireless links; and identify control knobs in the MAC/PHY layers with which the network capacity can be optimized.

Both Hyuk's and Tae-Seok's papers are accepted for presentation in the most prestigious ACM International Conf. on Mobile Computing and Networking, Mobicom 2006. The acceptance rate is 12% (36/300).

We have been working with Pervasive Platforms and Architectures Lab, Motorola Application Research Center on leveraging cell phones to facilitate elder people with their indepedent/assisted living. Motorla has donated latest linux-based EZX cell phones for our systems prototype experimentation, in addition to funding us through the Motorola Center for Communications program.

Ahmed Sobeih has been awarded the Vodafone Graduate Fellowship for AY 06-07. This award includes stipend, full tuition/fees, and expenses for one (1) year, with the start date of August 23, 2006.

Jong-Kwon's manuscript entitled "Modeling Steady-state and Transient Behaviors of User Mobility: Formulation, Analysis, and Application" has been accepted for publication in ACM Mobihoc 2006. The acceptance rate is 10%.

Professor Rong Zheng recently received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER). Her award winning proposal, entitled "Data Dissemination in Multihop Wireless Networks: Theory and System Design," addresses the theory and system design of data dissemination protocols with emphasis on their applications in operational systems such as wireless sensor networks and wireless mesh networks. The CAREER Award carries a stipend of $80,000 that is awarded annually for 5 years, totaling $400K.

Our project entitled "High-fidelity, Integrated Simulation and On-line Management for Networked Communications Systems" has been selected for funding by IIT/Boeing at a level of $127K/year for 3 years.

We will work with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on an ONR-funded SensorNet project. ORNL will fund us at a funding level of $100K/year for two years.

November

A total of 4 papers are accepted for publication in IEEE INFOCOM 2006! The acceptance rate this year is 17%

Jennifer Hou is invited to serve as a technical co-chair in IEEE 3rd IEEE Int'l Conf. on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS'06), November 2006.

Chunyu Hu has been chosen to receive a Motorola Center for Communication Fellowship for 2005-2006!

In the year of 2004-2005, four Ph.D. students have graduated from our group and landed very good jobs: Guanghui He joined Microsoft, Inc. as a software engineer, Hwangnam Kim went to Samsung, Inc., Ning Li went to University of California at Berkeley as a postdoctoral research fellow, and Honghai Zhang joined the Open Innovation Laboratories of Lucent Technologies, Whippany, NJ.

In the year of 2004-2005, we as a team have presented papers in the following high-quality, prestigious conferences: 3 in IEEE INFOCOM (acceptance ratio=17%), 1 in IEEE ICDCS (14%), 1 in ACM Sigmetrics (12%), 1 in IEEE ICNP (15%), in addition to several invited conference presentations. A total of 13 conference papers have been published. The journal publications are equally impressive, with papers being published in/accepted by ACM/IEEE Trans. on Networking (2), IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing (2), IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications (2), IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks, Elsevier Wireless Networks, and Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks.

Our assisted-living project has been selected for funding by NSF Computer Systems Research Program. Jennifer Hou is the PI, and Marco Caccamo, Carle Gunter, Karrie Karahalios, and Lui Sha are the Co-PIs. We aim to establish a software environment that allows disparate technologies, software components, and wireless devices of different protocol families to work together in a low cost, dependable, and secure fashion with predictable properties. The software environment will facilitate elder people with their indepedent living.

Ahmed Sobeih will join IBM T. J. Watson Research Center for an internship between June and December 2005.

We received a gift donation from Fujitsu Labs of America. We apprecaite Fujitsu Labs and Dr. Takeo Hamada for their generous donation for sponsoring our wireless mesh network research.

Our MURI team (entitled "DAWN: dynamic ad-hoc wireless networks" and led by Dr. J. J. Garcia-Luna UCSC) has been selected for funding by MURI Army Research Office. Both Jennifer Hou and Nitin Vaidya are on the UIUC team, and will work on energy-efficient protocol design and analysis, asymptotic study of fundamental performance limits of wireless networks, and wireless network simulation.